]]>It’s been an interesting two months for new social communications app Plague as it tries to prove its concept of a content sharing network built entirely on viral principles. When we first covered Plague after its launch in November, it only had a few hundred users, but in two months time, the app its seen 150,000 downloads and attracted a community of 38,000 daily active users, the app’s co-creator Ilya Zudin told me.

That’s pretty small potatoes compared to the giant social networks of the world, but its just getting started and to be frank, this rather sinister sounding app isn’t for everyone. Plague (not to be confused with the mobile game Plague Inc.) is designed as a way to spread content the same way a pathogen would spread across the globe.

A user creates a content card – say a photo, animated gif or plain text message – and that card “infects” the four nearest smartphones with the Plague app located. If you’re on the receiving end, you can choose to spread the infection further by up-voting the card or impede its spread by down-voting the card. Any up vote sends the infection off to the next four closest Plague users.

It’s a pretty simple concept but one that’s taken off in Plague’s small but growing community, Zudin said. So far users have created 334,000 cards, and through Plague’s viral vectors those cards have crisscrossed the globe 70 million times to infect other users’ phones. The most up votes a single card has received is 6,674 (with a nearly equal number of down votes), but the average infection is spread on 83 times, Zudin said.

An infection map for a typical Plague content post

As the app has taken on more widespread user base, the creepiness that characterized some of its early content shares has largely gone away, replaced with much more innocuous posts, ranging from celebrity quotes to amateur photography. What surprised Zudin and Plague’s developers at Lithuanian startup Deep Sea Marketing is that users began gravitating toward the comments sections of individual content post. So while each pathogen stops infecting new phones after seven days, their content lives in comments.

“Now that we understand how people are using Plague, we’re seeing they’re using it as a platform to have conversation,” Zudin said. “Our users are creating a community.”

But that community isn’t like another social network community. Users can’t follow or friend one another, and they remain strangers within the app. They can only interact within the context of a single content card they’ve all managed to become infected by. Some posts have generated over 1,000 comments.

Consequently, Deep Sea has tried to bump up the community features of Plague, Zudin said. Last week it launched an update to the Plague iOS and Android apps that allows users to follow comment threads on a particular content card as well as tools that let you share cards via SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook.

When I first spoke to Zudin he was concerned that Plague could be used as way to anonymously spread offensive or illegal material like child pornography, but he said those fears turned out to be unwarranted. Though Plague has option to report a particular user or post, the community has been largely self-policing, he said. After all, if a post is truly distasteful it usually gets voted down before it can spread beyond the first four Plague users, thus disappearing from the network.

]]>Facebook is finally getting into the office game. According to multiplereports, on Wednesday morning the company launched a pilot of its long-rumored Facebook at Work product, an application that aims to compete against the likes of Yammer and Slack.

Facebook at Work does exactly what it sounds like. It doesn’t connect to your personal profile. Instead, companies sign up their employees, forming a closed social network with familiar functions like news feeds and profiles. Facebook at Work will have its own separate iOS and Android apps, which Facebook put in the app store today. Most people won’t be able to download it, though, since the company limited its trial run to select companies.

The application may be too little too late, given that enterprise social networking companies have existed for years. The popular Slack is the latest entrant and was able to make headway in the market because existing products were too buggy or didn’t offer enough group chat functionality. Facebook might also struggle to convince people it’s a serious product that belongs in an office and not just a socializing app for personal use.

Conversely, companies that don’t already use a communication application might sign up for Facebook at Work due to their familiarity with the Facebook brand.

A spokesperson told Re/code that there are no ads in Facebook at Work and the pilot group of companies is using the service for free, so it’s not clear how Facebook intends to make money off the product.

]]>As we lay 2014 to rest, we’re topping our hats to some of the social media crazes that came along with it. Messaging. Anonymity. Ephemerality. Yo (whatever that was). At the same time, we’re stepping into a whole new year, which means a brand new bunch of communication trends. Here’s some of the trends, rising stars, and falling figures you can expect to see:

1) Chat as a platform

Some of the biggest social networking companies are turning their messaging applications into portals for other purposes. They’re following in the wake of China’s hugely successful WeChat app, which people use to flag cabs, manage their mortgage, send gifts, purchase goods, and play games.

Western companies are betting that Americans can be convinced to do the same. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said, “We believe that messaging is one of the few things that people actually do more than social networking.” If that level of engagement can be captured and channeled into other features, there’s money to be made.

In 2015, I suspect we’ll see Foursquare’s finale, unless it raises another round. Will it dump a ton of money into marketing and start to succeed with a more mainstream audience? Will it sell to a company like Twitter that might need its extensive location and user data?

4) Deep linking and app constellations

2014 was the year of The Great Unbundling in social. Mark Zuckerberg heralded the shift in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “In mobile there’s a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences. So what we’re doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app.” We saw Facebook in particular pursue this strategy, forcing users to download Facebook Messenger as a separate application. Likewise, Facebook property Instagram released the Hyperlapse app as a separate entity.

But these applications all connect back to one another — you can share a Hyperlapse video on Instagram and access Messenger through your core Facebook app. Such links take you to specific places in another app — like your conversation with another user — not just the app homescreen. As social applications turn into portals for other experiences in 2015, the deep linking trend and constellation of apps that communication with each other will only grow. Snapchat’s Snapcash, Messenger’s new “Stickered” app, and Uber’s API are only the beginning.

The Facebook predecessor, which dominated British social networking for awhile, sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. The corporate behemoth wasted no time at all in killing it.

But Bebo will not go softly into that dark night. In July of 2013, founder Michael Birch, with the help of his business wingman Shaan Puri, bought back the brand for a pittance of what he sold it for. Last week, he relaunched it.

The new Bebo is a whole new beast. Gone is the social network of yore, and in its place is — what else? — a chatting application.

Bebo is now all about the custom avatar, letting you pick from a range of hair styles, colors, skin tones, glasses, clothing, and accessories. Then when you chat with a friend on the app you can animate your avatar using hashtags. Check me and Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover in #goddamnit, #chucknorris, #Snapchat #firstworldproblems #ohsnap and #hashtags. There’s no one set list of hashtag illustration options — you have to play with the app to figure out what you can animate. But the options seemed endless.

Within minutes of chatting with Hoover, I started feeling unnaturally fond of my avatar, like she was my little sister in the cartoon dimension or something. One of my favorite features was a custom emoji keyboard that automatically populated in the app, turning regular winky faces and smirks into an approximation of your own face. I wish they’d break it out into a third-party keyboard that integrates with regular iOS 8 messaging.

It’s easy to dismiss Bebo as yet another frivolous first world app. And it totally is. But the app gives chatting an element of personalization, emotion, and imagery.

It could do for messaging what the emoticon did for text: Add a layer of sentiment that was previously hard to translate. Given that we’re moving to an increasingly chat centric world, that matters.

But that’s only if you dream big for Bebo. In reality, the app will struggle to convince people to download it in this noisy app environment. There’s a cognitive barrier to the conversations themselves, where you feel the need to conjure up witty hashtags in the hopes they’ll turn into funny pictures. In other words, it’s not an entirely natural way to chat.

Could it overcome those problems and revamp the Bebo brand? I guess we’ll see; after all, #YOLO.

]]>The new Grindr is all about that face. The company redesigned its iOS and Android app this month, abolishing text from a person’s first glance profile. If a user wants more information on someone than just their picture, they’ll have to click further to surface the profile summary. The matchmaking app for gay men also introduced a timing feature that tells two matches how long it would take them to walk to one another. It’s a little like Uber’s interface, but for your hookup — the bold new world of on-demand dating.

Despite the fact that it’s a comparably old app in smartphone years, Grindr has held sway over the gay male population since its launch in 2009. It’s self-funded with advertisements and subscriptions, and its biggest challenge is making sure it doesn’t lose its users to a new up-and-comer.

The redesign helps with that mission. By staying one step ahead of mobile dating trends, setting them instead of following them, Grindr hopes to keep its crown. And as Om Malik explored in this thoughtful post, the future of the web is visual. Images are easier and faster for our brain to process, they transcend language barriers, and they tap into our emotional reservoirs. As Om put it, “We are built to process visual data…That’s why the web is increasingly becoming visual.”

Grindr’s new imagery focus strips away any semblance of profile depth, arguably catering to a mobile dater’s more shallow instincts. But Grindr founder Joel Simkhai says he’s just giving the users what they want.

“One of the things we’re big believers in is men are visual creatures,” Simkhai says. “Copy and text are a lot less important. At this stage you’re not that interested in every little thing they’re interested in.”

The picture cues speed up people’s processing time for each profile. It allows users to swipe quickly through their choices, making faster split second decisions.

And speedy selection is, after all, the hallmark of mobile dating. Grindr arguably pioneered the industry, launching years in advance of the more heterosexually inclined Tinder app. When Grindr makes design decisions, it’s worth watching in case the rest of the mobile dating players follow suit.

But Simkhai doesn’t think we’ll see Tinder, Hinge, or other mobile dating apps minimize profile text any time soon. “Our target market is men and their target market is women because that’s what they need to make their app successful,” Simkhai says. “Women prefer it to be a little slower.”

]]>If you wanted to know where all the best holiday spots are in town, this might be your year. Social networking application Nextdoor has reached out to its users in 47,000 neighborhoods to map their cities’ best lights and attractions.

Nextdoor is an application where neighbors can connect to each other, share safety warnings, plan local events, and sell items ala Craigslist. It has grown in popularity in the United States, and using census data, the company estimates that one in four neighborhoods are on it.

The holiday map is a feature of the app. Little icons tell you where to find the best Christmas tree lots, best light displays, charity locations, Santa sightings, and holiday events. Find your neighborhood here.

Neighborhoods join the Nextdoor network when someone applies to draw their neighborhood boundary (and gets a handful of people to sign up with them). Some areas are far more active on Nextdoor than others, so the strength of your holiday cheer map might vary. Here’s a snapshot of San Francisco’s:

]]>Waterloo, Ontario is a quiet sort of suburban college town, far removed from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. Although it’s positioned in Canada’s Tech Triangle, it’s not the sort of place you’d expect America’s next social media powerhouse to come from.

That is both the promise and the challenge of Kik, a messaging app built by Waterloo students in 2009. As a chatting app launched early amid a relatively quiet app landscape, Kik saw an initial explosion of viral adoption, albeit through slightly spammy techniques, and has been growing ever since.

Now, four years since its launch, Kik is positioning itself as America’s version of WeChat, the messaging behemoth of China. It believes it has the right product (text messaging, the old-fashioned kind) and the right audience (almost half of U.S. youth) to become a proper mobile first platform.

If it succeeds, it stands to become the portal for the mobile economy, much like WeChat did in China. It could make a windfall of cash off brand and app partnerships and lead the way for the next generation of social networking. But there’s one big obstacle standing in its way: Most people have never even heard of Kik.

Much like anonymous chat app Yik Yak, Kik has built a devoted teen following without attracting a ton of attention from the tech press. With its investors largely based on the East Coast and a humble Canadian sensibility, Kik has toiled along without much ado.

The age of messaging multiplicity

Kik launched early in the messaging space; 2010, around the same time as WhatsApp and far earlier than Snapchat. Because it didn’t require a phone number (unlike SMS or WhatsApp), many teens who had iPod touches but not mobile phones could use it.

That feature became Kik’s killer tool. People connecting over public social networks like Instagram and Tumblr wanted a way to privately chat with each other without having to hand over personal information like their phone numbers. Since it was pseudo-anonymous, Kik became the defacto messaging app for Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. At the time of publishing, 21.5 million Instagram posts had been tagged with #Kikme.

With 185 million registered users, Kik estimates 40 percent of the U.S. youth population (13-25) is using it based on census data. It’s a powerful age group to have in your grasp. As we’ve seen with Facebook and other social applications, once enough teens adopt a tool, it spreads to other age groups.

Sure enough, Kik’s App Annie rankings show steady growth since its launch in 2010 — it’s currently ranked sixth in U.S. social networking apps and 35th in U.S. apps overall. Kik’s number of unique app users, as tracked by Comscore, mimics a similar hockey-stick trajectory, from 3.7 million in October 2012 to 16 million by October 2014.

Kik’s iOS download rankings since its launch. It’s currently ranked sixth in US social networking apps and 35th in US apps overall.

In the age of messaging multiplicity, WhatsApp (and Viber) became the app for those abroad, Snapchat became the app for pictures and video, and Kik became the American teen texting app of choice.

As all three companies have matured, Kik is arguably the best positioned in terms of product and audience to pursue a WeChat-style mobile platform in the U.S.

WeChat plays kingmaker

A WeChat billboard

For those of you unfamiliar with WeChat, here’s a quick rundown. It’s China’s mobile messaging powerhouse, an app that hooked users with chatting and then funneled their purchasing power into other properties. People play mobile games off WeChat, conduct their banking on WeChat, and occasionally buy products through WeChat.

This simple texting application, in other words, is a conduit to the rest of the web. It showed that social networking — and chatting in particular — can play kingmaker for commerce, financial management, and other industries by serving as the gateway to them. It’s what Facebook would look like today if it had been built mobile first and succeeded with its platform efforts (neither of which are true).

The company takes a cut of many of the transactions on its platform, in addition to making money by selling stickers. It also rakes in ad revenue from brands who connect with consumers through promoted messages. “Size assistants” from Tommy Hilfiger text with customers on WeChat to help them figure out their correct size. Celebrities record morning wake up greetings for the WeChat users who pay to receive them.

WeChat has, in part, inspired the current messaging app explosion. Line in Japan and KakaoTalk in Korea have implemented WeChat’s platform model to great success. KakaoTalk actually just went public by purchasing Korea’s second largest internet company, which was already public. Mark Zuckerberg was studying WeChat when he snapped up WhatsApp for $19 billion. Facebook’s new Messenger chief, David Marcus, told Bloomberg the company will be pursuing a WeChat strategy with Facebook Messenger.

“There are a number of things we can monetize,” Marcus said, pointing to the fact that WeChat users do everything from hailing cabs to exchanging business cards through the app.

Lastly, as The Informationreported in October, Snapchat has big plans for its own WeChat-like platform strategy. It rolled out its first platform effort – facilitating Square cash transactions between friends – just last week. Snapchat’s platform strategy isn’t a surprise, given that WeChat owner Tencent is a Snapchat investor.

How does Kik stand a chance, competing with such social networking heavyweights?

Big messaging baggage

Ephemeral latte art in the shape of the Snapchat logo. Disappears as soon as the first sip is taken.

Kik’s advantage comes from the fact that it’s not crippled by the weaknesses of its competitors: Snapchat’s ephemerality, Facebook’s reputation with teens, and WhatsApp’s foreign focus.

In terms of a core product, Snapchat is a tough sell to be a portal for other apps. Disappearing pictures and video don’t exactly lend themselves to things like bank account management and e-commerce transactions.

In fact, when the company introduced Snapcash the world collectively went, “Huh?” It wasn’t clear from the blog post launch how payments would work with ephemerality. Jokes abounded. “The money disappears in ten seconds right?” one Twitter user teased. “What if you were drunk and you accidentally sent someone $100?” one forum visitor asked.

It’s possible that Snapchat will figure out how to integrate more serious, permanent types of products into its platform. But convincing consumers to trust it – a company birthed from the brand of sexting and disappearing pictures – will be tough.

Facebook has similar baggage. It proved it’s not the best at working with other apps with its first attempt back in 2007, a debacle that taught many developers not to trust it. Furthermore, the youth of America – if you’ve been hiding under a rock – are not particularly enthused with the comparatively ancient social network, which houses their parents and grandparents. Facebook isn’t cool. And without the next generation on board, the company will have a hard time turning Messenger into a sustainable platform.

With 600 million users, WhatsApp has the product and the reach to build itself into a WeChat. But its real power is fragmented in countries across the globe, and it doesn’t have much of a hold on the American audience. The company hasn’t released its North American usage numbers, but research firms estimate it as being somewhere between five and ten percent. It could very well become the platform chat app for other countries (like India, Spain, and South Africa), but it’s unlikely to do so in the U.S.

Connecting people to the mobile economy

Kik branded hackey sacks

Enter Kik. The company doesn’t have as many American users as Snapchat, but at 185 million registered users it still has a sizeable chunk, far more than its measly PR efforts would suggest. Just like WeChat, it’s based on solid text based messages that don’t disappear after sending. Unlike Facebook, has already won over almost half of American youth, which is a key demographic for a social app.

And it has experimented with platform efforts almost since its inception. By 2011, Kik offered an API that other apps could use to connect to Kik. For example, users of a drawing app would be prompted to share their sketch on Kik to a friend, the same way you might share an Instagram photo to Facebook. These days, Kik’s integration with other apps comes in the form of cards. Users can send “cards” to their friends, from companies like Funny or Die, Moviefone, and NowThis News. The cards link to these brands’ apps and content.

In February, Kik introduced an in-app browser so its users could surf other parts of the web without ever leaving Kik. It rolled out Kik Points to reward users who did so. With earned points from interacting with third-party brands, sites, and apps through Kik, users can buy new stickers to share in chat.

As The Next Web pointed out, down the line Kik could use that gamification system to make advertising money. Brands are likely to pay extra if users can earn points by, say, visiting their website or downloading their game.

Kik has evolved these platform efforts in recent months, introducing Promoted Chats – a highly lucrative endeavor it modeled off WeChat. Users can chat with brands in the promoted section, and brands can target users with messages. At least at first, the open rates for such messages are high; averaging 98 percent according to Kik, and 74 percent according to some specific brand’s reports.

“We’re going to be the platform that connects people through chat to the mobile economy,” Kik cofounder Chris Best told me. He’s rather optimistic, but Kik’s success as a platform is by no means assured.

It hasn’t released its monthly active users — only its registered ones — which suggests the number of people who stick around on the app isn’t quite as prolific as those who download it in the first place. It battles major problems with pedophiles and sexbots, both of which have found the app to be fertile ground for victims.

Snapchat has it beat in terms of reputation, which makes it easier for the picture app to strike partnerships with banking or gaming or e-commerce institutions. Kik is barely known to the adults of America and the denizens of Silicon Valley, whereas Snapchat has become a household name. Facebook has nearly limitless cash reserves, armies of talented engineers, and the product vision of Mark Zuckerberg and David Marcus (former CEO of PayPal). WhatsApp has Facebook’s backing, plus a user base of 600 million monthly actives.

]]>We use the term viral to describe the way information spreads across the internet, but a new social communications app has taken that concept to its extreme. Instead of using the word “virus” as a metaphor, an app called Plague developed in Lithuania is making the virus the model for how it spreads content from device to device.

Plague shouldn’t be confused with Plague Inc., the extremely twisted but highly addictive mobile game, but they share a similar goal: to engineer a virus that will infect the world. In Plague Inc. you’re stuck within the in-game world, though, while Plague spreads from phone to phone across the physical globe.

Every disease is a simple bit of content, whether text, a link, a photo or a video. When you unleash it, it immediately seeks out the nearest four smartphones with the Plague app installed, infecting them with your content. When those four users next log in they will have the choice of spreading the infection by scrolling the screen up – infecting another four nearby users – or inoculating themselves against it by thumbing the screen downwards, thus abating the spread of the virus. You can also choose to comment on any given post.

It’s a simple as that. While every content post identifies its patient zero and any additional commenters by chosen screen name and starting location, users otherwise remain anonymous. There is no way to follow or message specific users. Your only means of interaction is to deal with the infections as they come.

And that’s the beauty of the app, its co-creator Ilya Zudin told me in a Skype interview from Vilnius, Lithuania, where his company Deep Sea Marketing makes its home. While other social networking apps let individual users accrue large followings and influence – thus increasing the chances any bit of their content will go viral — in Plague everyone starts and remains on the same footing, Zudin said. Everyone has four opportunities to spread any given infection – no more, no less – and anything posted on Plague has the same chance of either spreading around the globe or going no further than its creator’s smartphone.

Deep Sea only launched its Android and iOS apps last week, and it hasn’t promoted those apps it all, though it has the means to do so. Deep Sea has already produced a moderately successful photo-sharing app called We Heart Pics. When I unleashed my first infection last week, Plague only had a few hundred users, so my post jumped the Atlantic to somewhere in the Baltic states where the closest active users happened to be located.

An infection map of a Plague post

Right now the app depends on GPS location to find its possible infection vectors, but Zudin said his team is preparing for a day when the app could reach a level of penetration where infections can be spread by much closer contact. An update to Plague will allow the app to communicate off-the-grid, establishing direct peer-to-peer connections via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with no internet connection or server acting as intermediary, Zudin said. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same means off-grid messaging app FireChat uses to build its ad-hoc mesh networks, allowing nearby users to keep communicating when the internet goes down.

The update is called Dark Mode, and it’s intended to sounds just as sinister as Plague itself. Zudin acknowledged that Deep Sea is being tongue and cheek with its naming scheme, but he also admitted he is a bit wary about unleashing a truly off-grid anonymous content propagation tool on the world. If Plague devices are communicating anonymously below Deep Sea’s radar, truly offensive and illegal content could spread without any check or accountability.

“We have to be able to remove this kind of content before it has to chance to spread,” Zudin said. “For instance, it could be used to spread child pornography.”

In such an off-grid network, there’s no easy means of blocking individual users or flagging content. As devices get close to one another they link together, share their content and then disappear without a trace, truly emulating the behavior of epidemiological pathogen. It’s a fascinating concept in networking, but also one that’s a little bit scary.

]]>Facebook hosted its first ever town hall Q&A today with the netizens of the world. Modeled after a Reddit Ask Me Anything, users were prompted to post questions for CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the weeks leading up to the event. The most popular ones were selected by the company, and Zuckerberg answered them in a livestreamed meeting, with some of the questioners flown in to ask theirs in person.

The questions pre-selected by Facebook’s PR team were surprisingly compelling.

Zuckerberg covered everything from The Social Network (“They made up a bunch of stuff that I found hurtful”) to ebola (“What I wouldn’t give to go back to the seventies and fight to prevent HIV”) to his t-shirt style (“I like to clear my life so I can make as few decisions as possible”).

Here are the best questions asked and Zuckerberg’s response:

Why did you force us to install Messenger?

Zuckerberg laughed at the audacity of this one. “Alright we’re going to get right to this,” he said. He started off with an management-speak empathy shtick — he understands it was “a big ask” to require Facebook users to download a separate app. But he had a good reason. “We believe that messaging is one of the few things that people actually do more than social networking,” Zuckerberg said.

The messaging services that people use the most are the ones with the least amount of friction, like Snapchat and WhatsApp, and Facebook wants Messenger to be among them. Zuckerberg admitted, “We have a lot to earn in terms of trust and proving that this standalone messenger experience will be really good.”

What’s your favorite feature Facebook has developed but not released?

We got a window into the Facebook process with this one. Back in 2013, Facebook built a new version of its desktop timeline after users complained it looked outdated. The company was “really happy” to release it and even threw a press event pumping up the launch. But once it rolled out to a beta test of users, it didn’t go over so well.

“At Facebook, we have these big monitors,” Zuckerberg said. “It gave us a blind spot to the computers most people are using in the world.” As a result, the version of the newsfeed the company designed cut off the number of stories users could see on a normal screen. Engagement in the beta test plummeted, and Facebook scrapped the project.

Is Facebook becoming boring?

The social network CEO had a charming response prepared for this one as well. “It’s an interesting question to me because my goal was never to make Facebook cool,” Zuckerberg said. “I am not a cool person.” Of course, his answer skirts the fact that “cool” is very important to a social networking business. Arguably, “coolness” is what has helped Snapchat take off with teens, leading to Facebook offering to buy it for $3 billion.

Still, Zuckerberg’s elaboration on his answer was compelling. He said he wanted social networking to be functional, not cool, akin to a utility like electricity. “It doesn’t need to be in your face, it just should work,” Zuckerberg said.

And the softballs

Once the Q&A was opened to spontaneous questions from the audience, it devolves into fluffy softballs from “What’s your passion?” to “How do you overcome obstacles?” The one unplanned query that I wish had been worded more strongly was, “I’m curious about your perspective on the importance of diversifying tech.”

We might’ve gotten a little more insight into Facebook’s thinking on the issue if the person had asked how, exactly, Facebook planned to improve its employee diversity. But instead Zuckerberg called up Sheryl Sandberg, who did some rah-rahing — “We as a company believe that every girl out there can [work in tech] if she wants to” — and sat back down.

]]>Nextdoor, the private social network for neighborhoods, never seemed relevant for my millennial age demographic. It was the app version of a community board meeting or tea with your nosy neighbor, a place to learn about upcoming events, get recommendations on a plumber, hear the local chatter about the weird red car that’s been hanging around. Twenty-somethings in urban areas by-and-large don’t have kids, their lives don’t revolve around their home and they know their neighbors hardly, if at all. So even though I covered Nextdoor, I never felt compelled to actually become a user.

That changes today. Nextdoor has introduced a new element to its application that makes it a must-use network, even for the disinterested younger generations. It has started partnering with police and fire departments across the country — in 250 cities initially, with more to come — to use Nextdoor to communicate about emergencies and safety issues with local residents. Want a heads-up on a series of break-ins that have been happening in your area? The police precinct that oversees it can send information blasts, just to the neighborhoods that it impacts. Want to know whether it’s time for you to evacuate during a nearby brushfire — a major issue every fall in Southern California? Your local fire department might be using Nextdoor to get the word out. In fact, after the August earthquake, Napa — which was part of the 250 city test program — used Nextdoor to send out update information to residents.

In other words, the social network that initially connected neighbors to each other is now connecting vital city services to the residents themselves. Social networking has reached local government.

Of course, many local government branches have been using Twitter and Facebook for awhile to communicate with people. But these one size-fits-all platforms don’t work well for conveying detailed information that might only apply to people living on a few street blocks. Nextdoor is a whole different system. In order to join your neighborhood’s network you have to verify that you live there by — old school style — ordering a physical postcard sent to your home address. Various neighborhood newsfeeds are restricted, both for viewing and posting, to people who live there.

To integrate with police and fire departments, Nextdoor had to build an entirely separate application for government bodies to use. It didn’t want to violate the privacy of original Nextdoor neighbors, so it needed a way for these officials to post in the relevant networks without having access to view those networks’ content. Furthermore, it needed a way for government bodies to send targeted messages — specifically to particular Nextdoor neighborhoods, or to particular precincts or battalions or even to specific street coordinates. That way, they wouldn’t spam all Nextdoor users in a city.

And lastly, in order for this system to scale without massive manpower from Nextdoor, the site needed city onboarding to be an automatic process. Enter: Nextdoor for public agencies. It’s a self-serve site where police and fire chiefs can set up their department, determine who has access to messaging what neighborhoods, and send notifications to users in different areas of the city. Nextdoor built various prototypes over the span of 18 months with the 250 initial test cities. Now, it’s releasing its self-serve technology to the rest of the nation, so that even small provinces can use it.

It makes Nextdoor a far more significant use case, even if you aren’t a happy family of four who spends Saturdays barbecuing on your front porch. It’s a direct line to important, geographically relevant, safety-related communique from your local government. For those unfamiliar with the site, Nextdoor has been growing rapidly according to the vanity metrics the company released. When I wrote about it almost a year ago, roughly 23,000 neighborhood networks had been created (Nextdoor won’t allow a neighborhood to have its own network until ten people have confirmed they’re interested in joining). Now, that number is up to 43,000.

But the number that’s perhaps more relevant is engagement — that’s what will make or break this as a useful communication tool for local government. If people aren’t actually using their networks, police and fire departments aren’t going to waste their time sending out information blasts.

I would have guessed that people might create a Nextdoor network for their neighborhood and then stop using it if it didn’t provide enough value. That may be the case, but Nextdoor’s co-founder Sarah Leary told me 46 to 50 percent of users have created unique content on the site, like a post or a comment. “We push out a daily digest summary of the conversations, pointers back for people to engage back in the site,” Leary said. “The [digest] open rate is very high because as you can imagine if you see something in crime and safety you’ll want to know what’s going on.”